The more you exercise, the more effective your lungs will be. Building strong, healthy lungs through exercise helps you better resist ageing and disease. Even if you develop lung disease in the future, exercise helps slow the progression and keeps you active for longer. You can also increase your lung capacity by increasing the length of your inhalations and exhalations.
Start by counting how long a natural breath lasts. If the inhalation lasts five minutes, the exhalation should last five minutes. Try to make them the same length. Once you have figured out your average breath count, add one more count to each inhalation and exhalation until you can comfortably extend the time it takes to fill and empty your lungs.
The idea is to avoid strain or discomfort, and it should be a gradual and easy process. Lung exercises, such as pursed-lip breathing and abdominal breathing, can help a person improve their lung function. Your body has a natural defence system designed to protect the lungs, keeping dirt and germs at bay. But there are some important things you can do to reduce the risk of lung disease.
Here are some ways to keep your lungs healthy. When you are physically active, your heart and lungs work harder to supply the extra oxygen demanded by your muscles. Just as regular exercise strengthens your muscles, it also strengthens your lungs and heart. As your fitness improves, your body becomes more efficient at getting oxygen into your bloodstream and transporting it to your working muscles.
This is one reason why, over time, you are less likely to become short of breath during exercise. Since regular daily activity does not help you use your lungs to their full potential, you need to challenge your lungs with more intense activity. Exercise cannot reverse lung damage, but it can help a person use their lungs to their full capacity. For example, the British Lung Foundation claims that deep breathing can help clear mucus from the lungs after pneumonia, allowing more air to circulate.
This is the basis of breathing exercises designed to help people with lung diseases such as asthma and COPD, which can trap stale air and impair the lungs' natural elasticity. Just as aerobic exercise helps improve heart health, breathing exercises can make the lungs work more efficiently. For people with chronic lung diseases, such as pulmonary fibrosis and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD), the lungs have difficulty supplying the body with the necessary amounts of oxygen. Here are a handful of simple exercises you can do to improve your lung health and make breathing easier.
Increasing your daily activity level, in general, can go a long way towards improving your lung health. Given how essential these tasks are, it is not surprising that the health of the body as a whole suffers when chronic lung problems develop. The level of lung function also determines how effectively the lungs deliver oxygen and remove carbon dioxide from the bloodstream. Lung exercises provide ways to help the lungs become more efficient in managing airflow and oxygen levels.
The diaphragm muscle should help the lungs fill with air by moving downwards and then push the air out of the lungs as it moves back up. Chronic lung conditions, such as bronchitis and asthma, often result from inflammation of the airways that prevent air from circulating through the lungs. Fortunately, there are exercises that can help maintain and increase lung capacity, making it easier for the lungs to stay healthy and for the body to get the oxygen it needs. Lung specialists recommend breathing exercises for people with COPD and asthma because they help keep the lungs strong.